falsehood/README.md

# Awesome Falsehood [![Awesome](https://cdn.rawgit.com/sindresorhus/awesome/d7305f38d29fed78fa85652e3a63e154dd8e8829/media/badge.svg)](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome) [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood)

A curated list of awesome falsehoods programmers believe in.

> The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.
> - Ludwig Wittgenstein


## Contents

- [Foreword](#foreword)
---
- [Meta](#meta)
- [Arts](#arts)
- [Business](#business)
- [Dates and Time](#dates-and-time)
- [Education](#education)
- [Emails](#emails)
- [Geography](#geography)
- [Human Identity](#human-identity)
- [Internationalization](#internationalization)
- [Multimedia](#multimedia)
- [Networks](#networks)
- [Phone Numbers](#phone-numbers)
- [Postal Addresses](#postal-addresses)
- [Science](#science)
- [Society](#society)
- [Software Engineering](#software-engineering)
- [Typography](#typography)
---
- [Contributing](#contributing)
- [Good Candidates](#good-candidates)
    - [*Falsehood* Articles](#falsehood-articles)
    - [Libraries](#libraries)
    - [Data Structures](#data-structures)
- [License](#license)


## Foreword

*Falsehood* articles are a form of commentary on a particular subject, and are
appreciated by the developer community at large for their effectiveness and
terseness. They're a convenient written form to approach an unfamiliar domain
by dispelling myths, point out common pitfalls, show inconsistencies and
subtleties.

In a sense, *Falsehood* articles are a suite of wordy unit-tests covering
extensive edge-cases provided by real-world usage.


## Meta

- [Falsehoods Programmers
Believe](https://spaceninja.com/2015/12/07/falsehoods-programmers-believe/) - A
brief list of common falsehoods. A great overview and quick introduction into
the world of falsehoods.
- [Falsehoods About
Programming](https://chiselapp.com/user/ttmrichter/repository/gng/doc/trunk/output/falsehoods.html) -
A humbling and fun list on programming and programmers themselves.
- [Falsehoods About Falsehoods
Lists](https://kevin.deldycke.com/2016/12/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-falsehoods-lists/) -
Meta commentary on how these falsehoods shouldn't be handled.


## Arts

- [Falsehoods About
Music](https://literateprogrammer.blogspot.fr/2016/07/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about.html) -
False assumption that might be made in codifying music.
- [Falsehoods About Art](http://artsy.github.io/blog/2018/04/18/programmer-misconceptions-about-art/) –
Common misconceptions about art.


## Business

- [Falsehoods About Online
Shopping](http://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=22201) - Covers prices,
currencies and inventory.
- [Falsehoods About
Prices](https://gist.github.com/rgs/6509585) - Covers currencies, amounts and
localization.
- [Falsehoods About
IBANs](https://github.com/globalcitizen/php-iban/blob/master/docs/FALSEHOODS.md) -
International Bank Account Numbers are not immune to mistakes.
- [Falsehoods About Job
Applicants](https://web.archive.org/web/20170114022820/https://medium.com/@creatrixtiara/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-job-applicants-99280437c616) -
Assumptions about job applicants and their job histories aren’t necessarily
true.
- [Falsehoods About
Economics](http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2016/09/22/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-economics/) -
Economics are not simple or rational.
- [Falsehoods About
Cars](https://github.com/driveto/falsehoods-about-cars) -
Even something as common as defining a car is full of pitfalls.
- [CLDR currency
definitions](http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/browser/tags/release-31/common/supplemental/supplementalData.xml#L81) -
Currency validity date ranges overlap due to revolts, invasions, new
constitutions, and slow planned adoption.
- [`tax`](https://github.com/commerceguys/tax) - A PHP 5.4+ tax management
library.


## Dates and Time

- [Falsehoods About
Time](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time) -
Seminal article on dates and time.
- [More Falsehoods About
Time](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time) -
Part. 2 of the article above.
- [Falsehoods About Time and Time
Zones](https://www.creativedeletion.com/2015/01/28/falsehoods-programmers-date-time-zones.html) -
Another takes on time-related falsehoods, with an emphasis on time zones.
- [Critique of Falsehoods About
Time](https://gist.github.com/thanatos/eee17100476a336a711e) - Takes on the
first article above and provides an explanation of each falsehood, with more
context and external resources.
- [Your Calendrical Fallacy Is Thinking…](http://yourcalendricalfallacyis.com) -
List covering intercalation and cultural influence, made by a community of iOS
and macOS developers.
- [Time Zone Database](https://www.iana.org/time-zones) - Code and data that
represent the history of local time for many representative locations around
the globe.
- [The Long, Painful History of Time](http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html) - Most
of the idiosyncrasies in time keeping can find an explanation in history.
- [You Advocate a Calendar Reform](https://qntm.org/calendar) - Your idea will
not work. This article tells you why.
- [So You Want to Abolish Time Zones](https://qntm.org/abolish) – Abolishing
timezones may sound like a good idea, but there are quite a few complications
that make it not quite so.
- [The Problem with Time & Timezones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY) -
A video about why you should never, ever deal with timezones if you can help
it.
- [$26,000 Overcollection by Labor
Department](http://digital.vpr.net/post/rounding-error-computer-code-leads-26000-overcollection-labor-department) -
The consequence of wrong calendar accounting.
- [ISO-8601, YYYY, yyyy, and why your year may be 
wrong](https://ericasadun.com/2018/12/25/iso-8601-yyyy-yyyy-and-why-your-year-may-be-wrong/) -
String formatting of date is hard.
- [UTC is Enough for everyone, right?](https://zachholman.com/talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone-right) - There are edge cases about dates and time (specifically UTC) that you probably haven't thought of.
- [Storing UTC is not a silver bullet](https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/) - "Just store dates in UTC" is not always the right approach..
- [Falsehoods about Unix Time](https://alexwlchan.net/2019/05/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-unix-time/) - Mind the leap second!
- [Why is subtracting these two times (in 1927) giving a strange result?](https://stackoverflow.com/a/6841479/57311) - Infamous StackOverflow answer about both complicated historical timezones, and how historical dates can be re-interpreted by newer versions of software. 


## Education

- [Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating](https://www.netmeister.org/blog/cs-falsehoods.html) - A list of things (not only) computer science students tend to erroneously and at times surprisingly believe even though they (probably) should know better.


## Emails

- [I Knew How to Validate an Email Address Until I Read the
RFC](https://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate-an-email-address-until-i.aspx/) -
Provides intricate examples that are unsuspected valid email addresses
according the RFC-822.
- [So you think you can validate email addresses (FOSDEM 2018)](https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/email_address_quiz/) -
Presentation of edge-case email addresses and why you should not use regex to parse them.


## Geography

- [Falsehoods About
Geography](http://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=15187) - Takes on places,
their names and locations.
- [Falsehoods About
Maps](http://www.atlefren.net/post/2014/09/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-maps/) -
Covers coordinates, projection and GIS.


## Human Identity

- [Falsehoods About
Names](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/) -
The article that started it all.
- [Falsehoods About
Names – With Examples](https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/) -
A revisited version of the article above, this time with detailed explanations.
- Falsehoods About Gender: [#1](https://gist.github.com/garbados/f82604ea639e0e47bf44) &
[#2](https://medium.com/gender-2-0/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-gender-f9a3512b4c9c) -
Gender is part of human identity and has its own subtleties.
- [Gay Marriage: The Database Engineering Perspective](https://qntm.org/gay) -
How to store a marriage in a database while addressing most of the falsehoods
about gender, naming and relationships.
- [Falsehoods Programmers Believe About
Families](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/03/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-families/) -
You can't really define a family with strict rules.
- [Personal Names Around the
World](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names) - How do
people's names differ around the world, and what are the implications for the
Web?
- [XKCD #327: Exploits of a
Mom](https://xkcd.com/327/) - Funny take on how implementation of a falsehood
might lead to security holes.
- [Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to
Computers](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/) - Real-life example on how
implemented falsehood has negative impact on someone's life.
- [My name causes an issue with any booking!](https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-causes-an-issue-with-any-booking-names-end-with-mr-and-mrs) -
Old airline reservation systems considers the `MR` suffix as `Mister` and drops it.
- [HL7 v3
RIM](https://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?product_id=186) -
A flexible data model for representing human names.
- [Apple iOS
`NSPersonNameComponentsFormatter`](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Miscellaneous/Reference/NSPersonNameComponentsFormatter_Class/index.html) -
Localized representations of the components of a person’s name.
- [Falsehoods About Me](https://skylarmacdonald.com/falsehoods/) - Issues at the
intersection of names and gender and internationalisation.


## Internationalization

- [Falsehoods About
Language](http://garbled.benhamill.com/2017/04/18/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-language) -
Translating a software from English is not as straightforward as it seems to
be.
- [i18n Testing Data](https://github.com/patch/i18n-testing) - Real-word
international and diverse name data for unit testing and QA.
- [Internationalis(z)ing Code](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j74jcxSunY) -
A video about things you need to keep in mind when internationalizing your
code.
- [Minimum to Know About Unicode and Character Sets](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/) - Character encoding doesn't have to be baffling, but it helps to have a basic set of knowledge
- [Ode to a shipping label](http://i.imgur.com/4J7Il0m.jpg) - Character encoding is hard.


## Multimedia

- [Falsehoods About
Video](https://haasn.xyz/posts/2016-12-25-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-%5Bvideo-stuff%5D.html) -
Cover it all: video decoding and playback, files, image scaling, color spaces
and conversion, displays and subtitles.


## Networks

- [Falsehoods About
Networks](http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/06/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about.html) -
Covers TCP, DHCP, DNS, VLANs and IPv4/v6.
- [Fallacies of Distributed
Computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing) -
Assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.
- [There’s more than one way to write an IP address](https://ma.ttias.be/theres-more-than-one-way-to-write-an-ip-address/) - Some parts of the address are optional, mind the decimal and octal notations, and [don't forget IPv6](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20390981) either.
- [`hostname-validate`](https://github.com/jakeogh/hostname-validate) - An attempt to validate hostnames in Python.


## Phone Numbers

- [Falsehoods About Phone
Numbers](https://github.com/googlei18n/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHOODS.md) -
Covers phone numbers, their representation and meaning.
- [`libphonenumber`](https://github.com/googlei18n/libphonenumber) - Google's
common Java, C++ and JavaScript library for parsing, formatting, and validating
international phone numbers. Also available for
[C#](https://github.com/twcclegg/libphonenumber-csharp),
[Objective-C](https://github.com/iziz/libPhoneNumber-iOS),
[Python](https://github.com/daviddrysdale/python-phonenumbers),
[Ruby](https://github.com/sstephenson/global_phone) and
[PHP](https://github.com/giggsey/libphonenumber-for-php).


## Postal Addresses

- [Falsehoods About
Addresses](https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/) -
Covers streets, postal codes, buildings, cities and countries.
- [Falsehoods About
Residence](https://twitter.com/samphippen/status/813896916534784004) -
It's not only about the address itself, but the relationship between a person and its residence.
- [Letter Delivered Despite No Name, No
Address](https://twitter.com/loriskumo/status/735851511331356672) - Ultimate
falsehood about postal addresses: you do not need one.
- [The Bear with Its Own ZIP Code](https://kottke.org/19/08/the-bear-with-its-own-zip-code) -
Smokey Bear has his own ZIP Code (`20252`) because he gets so much mail.
- [Regex and Postal
Addresses](https://smartystreets.com/articles/regular-expressions-for-street-addresses) -
Why regular expressions and street addresses do not mix.
- [`libaddressinput`](https://github.com/googlei18n/libaddressinput) - Google's
common C++ and Java library for parsing, formatting, and validating
international postal addresses.
- [`addressing`](https://github.com/commerceguys/addressing) - A PHP 5.4+
addressing library, powered by Google's dataset.
- [`postal-address`](https://github.com/scaleway/postal-address) - Python
module to parse, normalize and render postal addresses.
- [`address`](https://github.com/Boostport/address) - Go library to validate
and format addresses using Google's dataset.


## Science

- [Falsehoods About Systems of
Measurement](https://www.stevemoser.org/posts/dev/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-systems-of-measurement.html) -
On working with systems of measurement and converting between them.


## Society

- [Falsehoods About Political
Appointments](https://twitter.com/oliver_dw/status/737930439575404544) -
Designing election systems has its own tricks.
- [Falsehoods About Women In
Tech](https://gist.github.com/Su-Shee/5d1a417fa9de19c15477) - Myth about women
in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) industries.


## Software Engineering

- [Falsehoods About
Versions](https://github.com/xenoterracide/falsehoods/blob/master/versions.md) -
Attributing an identity to a software release might be harder than thought.
- [Falsehoods About Build
Systems](https://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/174763.html) - Building software is
hard. Building software that builds software is harder.
- [Myths About File
Paths](https://yakking.branchable.com/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-file-paths/) -
Diversity of file-systems and OSes makes file paths a little harder than we
might think of.
- [Falsehoods About REST
APIs](http://slinkp.com/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-apis.html) -
Pitfalls to be mindful of when creating and documenting APIs.
- [Falsehoods About
CSVs](https://donatstudios.com/Falsehoods-Programmers-Believe-About-CSVs) -
While RFC4180 to exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.
- [Falsehoods About Package
Managers](https://meta-package-manager.readthedocs.io/en/develop/falsehoods.html) -
Covers package and their managers.
- [Falsehoods About
Testing](https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/falsehoods-testers-believe/1371) -
An attempt to establish a list of falsehoods about testing.
- [Big List of Naughty
Strings](https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings) - Challenge
your assumptions about strings.
- [Popular misconceptions about mtime](https://apenwarr.ca/log/20181113) - Part
of a post on why file mtime comparison could be considered harmful.
- [Falsehoods About
Pagination](https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2018/12/12/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-pagination.html) - 
Why your pagination algorithm is giving someone (possibly you) a headache.
- [Rules for Autocomplete](http://jeremymikkola.com/posts/2019_03_19_rules_for_autocomplete.html) - 
Not falsehoods *per-se*, but still a great list of good practices to implement autocompletion.
- [9999999999999999.0 - 9999999999999998.0](http://geocar.sdf1.org/numbers.html) - A
kind of falsehood on numbers, and floats vs decimals.
- [Falsehoods About Search](https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2019/05/29/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-search/) -
Why search (including analysis, tokenization, highlighting) is deceptively
complex.
- [Hi! My name is...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIebelIpdYk) - This talk could have been named falsehoods about in usernames (and other identifiers).
- [Myths about /dev/urandom](https://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom) - There are a few things about /dev/urandom and /dev/random that are repeated again and again. Still they are false.
- [Myths about CPU Caches](https://software.rajivprab.com/2018/04/29/myths-programmers-believe-about-cpu-caches/) - Misconceptions about caches often lead to false assertions, especially when it comes to concurrency and race conditions.


## Typography

- [Falsehoods About Fonts](https://github.com/RoelN/Font-Falsehoods) -
Assumptions about typography on the web and in desktop applications.
- [Truths programmers should know about case](https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2018/nov/26/case/) - A complete reverse of
the falshoods format, on the topic of case (as in uppercase and lowercase text). 


## Contributing

Your contributions are always welcome! Please take a look at the [contribution
guidelines](CONTRIBUTING.md) first.


## Good Candidates

Here is a non-restrictive list of items which are good candidates for inclusion
in this awesome list.

### *Falsehood* Articles

Articles following the *falsehood* scheme are prime candidates for inclusion in
this awesome list.

These articles starts with the hypothesis that developers have a naive, simple
view of the subject at hand. Then proceed to list a set of candid assumptions
that might be held by such programmers. Each one is intentionally false, and
sometimes illustrated by a counter-example.

A list of falsehood is crafted as a progression that is designed to refine
concepts. Having read the whole list of falsehood, the reader should possess a
global, if not complete, overview of the domain being targeted by the article,
including most, if not all, its pitfalls, edges-cases and inconsistencies.

In the worst case, these articles might provoke an emotional reaction and cause
flipping table. `(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻`

Articles featuring items that are applicable to a product and a product only
can't really be considered as generic falsehood articles and should be avoided.

### Libraries

When possible, we provide a list of programming libraries or modules that may
solve, or try to, the complexities and idiosyncrasies pointed by the
*falsehood* articles above.

So we can put back tables in place. `┬─┬ ノ( ゜-゜ノ)`

### Data Structures

Data models and structures generic enough to cover and address most of the
falsehoods are also welcome in this page.


## License

[![CC0](https://mirrors.creativecommons.org/presskit/buttons/88x31/svg/cc-zero.svg)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

Content of this repository is licensed under the [Creative Commons CC0
license](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).

To the extent possible under law, [Kevin Deldycke](https://kevin.deldycke.com)
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.